Until recently I hadn’t read Sven Birkerts’s 1993 book The Gutenberg Elegies, despite it being about a topic that I am fairly invested in: “the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,” as the subtitle has it. I had a vague impression from my graduate school days that the book was reactionary and anti-theoretical, the sort of work that complains about postmodernist theorists as though they were advocates rather than diagnosticians. I assumed it was full of paeans to reading as a sacred, arcane art that proved that the souls of certain people (literature undergraduates, humanist professors) were deeper and richer than the addled dupes who watched television. Later on, I saw it as an Ur-text for critics who wanted to insist that the internet was making people stupid and that phones and screens were emptying people of their capacity to have “real” conversations or “authentic” personalities.
The Reading Wars
The Reading Wars
The Reading Wars
Until recently I hadn’t read Sven Birkerts’s 1993 book The Gutenberg Elegies, despite it being about a topic that I am fairly invested in: “the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,” as the subtitle has it. I had a vague impression from my graduate school days that the book was reactionary and anti-theoretical, the sort of work that complains about postmodernist theorists as though they were advocates rather than diagnosticians. I assumed it was full of paeans to reading as a sacred, arcane art that proved that the souls of certain people (literature undergraduates, humanist professors) were deeper and richer than the addled dupes who watched television. Later on, I saw it as an Ur-text for critics who wanted to insist that the internet was making people stupid and that phones and screens were emptying people of their capacity to have “real” conversations or “authentic” personalities.